Emily Barker: The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

The pitcher, dewy with condensation, drew Nora’s attention. Coming closer, she saw it was full of some drink that looked like cranberry juice or iced Red Zinger or even cherry Kool-Aid. Anything cool and liquid was fine with her. She poured herself a drink, ice cubes chiming in her glass, and took a long swallow. Some sort of punch. She couldn’t quite describe the flavor. Draining her glass, she poured herself another.

“You must be very thirsty,” said a woman’s voice behind her, throaty, amused.

Nora spun around. The woman standing on the pavement was smiling, but it was hard to see her face beneath the oversize Jackie O sunglasses. She wore a white silk scarf over a glossy pile of chestnut hair. Her dress was also white, a sleeveless, tailored sheath that ended just above her knees. She had the sort of delicate, never-ending legs that movie studios used to insure for their starlets. Around her neck was a choker of pearls so large that Nora thought that they had to be fake, but she wasn’t entirely sure, because everything about this woman screamed money. Nora was too young to remember the Sixties, but this woman looked like her idea of the Beautiful People, what the jet-setters looked like back when jets were still glamorous. On someone else the clothes and hair might have looked campy; on this woman they looked only chic.

Horrified, Nora began to apologize. “It must seem incredibly rude for me to help myself this way—well, to be here at all. I got lost on the mountain.” She offered a nervous smile. “Your grounds are so lovely—and I was hoping to meet someone who could show me the way back. I’m very, very sorry to intrude like this. I don’t know what got into me.”

The woman laughed. “But you were thirsty. Go ahead, drink the rest.”

She waited expectantly, so Nora raised the glass to her lips. She drank as quickly as she could without gulping.

“Do you like it?” the woman asked. “A friend of mine gave me the recipe.”

“It’s delicious,” Nora said politely. “What is in it?”

“Blood oranges, hibiscus nectar, moonlight!” she said, laughing again. Not quite sure what the joke was, Nora smiled anyway. “But tell me about yourself. You came from the mountain, you say. So far! You must have passed the little graveyard?” The woman drew the last word out, searchingly. Nora could hear the trace of an accent in her voice. Something Italian in the way she caressed her vowels. But there was also a clipped undertone that sounded British, posh, authoritative, making Nora think of nannies and boarding schools and country houses. “It has been so long since I was up there. What is it like now? All the little stones in good order? The fence still standing?”

“It’s a bit run-down, but everything is still basically upright. A strange place,” Nora said uncertainly. Would this woman think it peculiar if she mentioned Emmeline’s grave and the odd verses on the stone?

The other woman nodded. “Yes, it is so lonely, in the middle of the woods. There are still woods? And you? What is your name?” Nora gave her name, and the woman smiled. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Nora,” she said.

“And yours?” Nora asked. She had a sudden, unnerving intuition that the answer would be “Emmeline.” That was silly; she was talking to a flesh-and-blood woman; there was no such thing as ghosts. But she was relieved when the other woman said, with a moment’s hesitation, “You may call me Ilissa. It’s what you’d call a nickname. My full name goes something like this—” She rattled off a rapid string of syllables that Nora couldn’t quite follow. “But that’s too long and boring to say. I make my friends call me Ilissa.”

“It’s a lovely name.”

“You’re too kind! But please, sit down. You must be tired with walking so far this afternoon.”

Nora demurred, apologizing again for her intrusion. She had already imposed enough on the other woman’s good manners. But Ilissa insisted. She had been feeling bored and lonely all day, she said with a brilliant smile. It was wonderful good luck for her that Nora had appeared, and she refused to let her new friend leave—“I’m sorry, I’m just unreasonable!”—until they had had a good long chat. Nora found herself sitting on one of the recliners, sipping another glass of the red punch, and answering Ilissa’s questions. The punch must have had some alcohol in it—maybe that was what Ilissa meant by moonlight—because Nora began to feel a light buzz, and was talking more than she had expected to, trying to make a joke out of some of the things that had gone wrong lately: the problems with her thesis, Naomi’s disapproval, her dead cat, the mouse in the kitchen. Ilissa listened, apparently rapt.

Although Nora hadn’t meant to mention anything terribly personal, even the details of last night’s humiliating encounter with Dave came spilling out.

“Oh, but what an idiot,” said Ilissa, clucking her tongue. “Ignoring that other poor girl, toying with your feelings—and then not even seeing to his own pleasure or yours! No one has any fun! Everyone is unhappy!”

Nora laughed. Last night, she hadn’t considered the situation in exactly that light, but Ilissa had a point.

“I’m surprised, though, that a beautiful girl like you is unattached. Or did you leave your young man back at your university?” Ilissa said, smiling. She leaned forward and studied Nora’s face. “Wait, I see you have had another disappointment in love recently. This one is more serious than that boy who was so silly last night.”

Nora gave a feebly dismissive wave of her hand—her litany of woes, she thought, must be getting tedious for this elegant creature. But Ilissa would not be put off. So Nora told her the story of her breakup with Adam and then, because the other woman still seemed so interested, the whole history of their relationship, starting with their flirtation in Renaissance Lyric, when Adam had been impressed with Nora’s knowledge of Elizabethan sexual puns; his specialty was the modern novel. That was almost four years ago. Adam became her ally in that seminar, taught by the ruthless Naomi Danziger, and by the end of the semester, they were a couple.

As Nora went on talking, Ilissa took off her sunglasses to reveal her own eyes: a deep blue-green, slightly aslant. She looked older than Nora had expected. Not that there were any lines around those clear eyes, but her face had a honed, decisive look, as though she were used to being in charge.

“Oh, he wasn’t good enough for you,” Ilissa said dismissively, when Nora paused after describing Adam’s move to Chicago. “He didn’t know his own mind. Most men don’t, of course—I’ve learned that all too well. He got scared and lonely and he grabbed the nearest woman, this Celeste person. Men! What can you do?”

Nora couldn’t imagine Ilissa ever having trouble with men straying or not knowing whether they were in love with her or not. She said so, and Ilissa burst into a fit of giggles. “You’re so funny! If you only knew!” she said.

Then she looked more seriously at Nora. “But the important thing now is to enjoy yourself. A broken heart doesn’t heal until you lose it to someone else. You need diversion. You should simply play, play, play—surround yourself with men until one of them makes you forget all about this poor, childish, confused Adam.”

“Surround myself with men?” Nora smiled wryly. “As though it were that easy.”

Ilissa arched her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “As it happens, I am having a party this very night, and I can assure you there will be all sorts of delightful male creatures there. It is exactly what you need. My parties are famous. Everyone always has a marvelous time, they dance, they laugh, they fall in love—sometimes twice or three times in one night. People ask me, ‘Ilissa, what is your secret?’ I tell them, ‘There is no secret. I simply invite my friends, the most beautiful and charming people in the world.’”